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What is the AJ Buildings Library?

Find out about the AJ Buildings Library, our growing archive of 1,500 built projects, including plans and details. Subscribe for access today

The AJ Buildings Library (AJBuildingsLibrary.co.uk) is a tool for researching building precedents, but it is useful throughout all RIBA work stages, from feasibility studies to detailed design.

Search for a building type, such as ‘theatre’ or ‘primary school’, and you can compare spatial planning, cost, and floor area across a typology. You can also research the project team - see examples of their work by clicking on their name in the project team, or search by materials such as ‘zinc’, environmental criteria such as a search for ‘Passivhaus’, or search by city such as ‘Glasgow’ or ‘Sheffield’. The bespoke zoom and viewing functions allow you to navigate drawings with ease, or open them as a PDF.

The library also allows you tosave projects and generate reports. If you would like to save a project to your library for future reference, click ‘Add to Shortlist’ on the project page. To view the projects you’ve saved, either click ‘View Shortlist’ or ‘Saved Lists’ to view previously saved projects.

The AJ Buildings Library is the natural extension of the AJ, developed in the tradition of this historic title. After all, the promise of a ‘buildings library’ has long been intrinsic to the value of an AJ subscription. Every issue, catalogued over a career, has characterised the profession for more than a hundred years.

But shelf space is limited in the modern world, in a way that a digital archive is not. Paper is precious. When we publish a building in the AJ, we select the most relevant drawings to illustrate the story told. In the AJBL, we include every drawing. From now on, when you see the AJBL logo on a building study in the magazine, you’ll find it in the library, where a thousand buildings are now available for your study, whether you subscribed 20 years ago, or today.

Accessing the AJ Buildings LibraryIf you are an existing subscriber and you’ve never visited the AJ Buildings Library before, click on ‘Register’ and then log into the AJBL using the same login and password as you use on the AJ website. If you’ve never registered for the AJ website, or you are not a subscriber, you must subscribe or register your subscription first by clicking ‘Sign in’ on TheAJ.co.uk

Readers' comments
(1)

In the AJBL it would be most helpful if you could add the details where and in which magazine the article can be found, as my bound AJs go back to the 1970s. The only other way to do this is through the RIBA Library website, but its search tool is rather clunky.

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The Architects' Journal is the voice of architecture in Britain. We sit at the heart of the debate about British architecture and British cities, and form opinions across the whole construction industry on design-related matters